An American Story (9 page)

The world went white with pain and fury while he used the extension cord on me. I heard Mama yelling something but was never able to make it out. It was probably what she always said when he whipped us:

“That's enough, Eddie. That's enough, Eddie.”

He beat me and he beat me and he beat me. Sweat dropped from his face onto the back of my neck and his breathing was ragged. The hand squeezing my throat against the fixtures closed and opened spasmodically. By then, I was clinging to the faucet as if it were a life preserver while the rest of my body bucked and thrashed, unable to escape either Daddy's grip or the cord's reach. I rubbed my face wantonly against the faucet's coolness while colored lights flashed behind my eyelids. I babbled little prayers to it—my smooth metal tether to an unwhipped world—that I only heard once the whistle of the extension cord went away.

“PleaseGod, pleaseGod, pleaseGod, pleaseGod, pleaseGod,” I begged, understanding for once the full extent of the humility the preachers were always lecturing about in church. Please God make it stop. I'd left the last three words off, but I was sure He knew what I was talking about.

Daddy dropped both me and the cord as if we suddenly weighed a ton.

“Put that up,” he spat. With my face still at sink level, I could only assume he meant the cord I could see coiled up like a sudden snake at his feet.

“Clean yourself up and git to bed like I done told you.” His voice shook. Somehow, I found myself standing at the foot of my twin bed. I chose not to remember how long it took me to climb the stairs. A sweltering fall night, Necie was a stone mound swaddled in blankets against the far wall next to her bed. She was whimpering. I had nothing to say to her.

In the center of my bed lay the big family Bible. Behind me, Daddy was saying that I'd done read enough about white ladies in long dresses carryin on. I needed to get right with the Lord, good sista. I had not heard him coming this time either.

Something fell on my sneaker. I looked down and there was the extension cord again. I must have picked it up. I wondered if I'd get in trouble for not putting it back like he said, but he must have melted away.

My neck was excruciatingly sore, but even so I forced my head around to check the dresser top. As I'd suspected, my pile of library books was gone. My legs bloody, my pride gone, I determined to start hiding my books. That way, as long as I hid them well, he could only take them away one at a time. We would soon know if I had inherited the Dickerson stealth.

I struggled into my (too large, one arm shorter than the other) nightgown, moaning and rocking myself like an old lady to finesse the pain. Sleeping bottomless, let alone naked, was indecent, out of the question. Necie's mound never moved. I de-hospital-cornered my bed just enough to slip into it, hit the light switch, and collapsed face first on my thin pillow. I sighed, knowing I'd be awake all night, then cut it off in terror before the sigh could become tears. God help me if I cried again.

I ached for C. S. Lewis, or Dickens. Even a Brontë. Then I remembered the Bible I'd let tumble to the floor. I lay on my stomach waiting for the house to settle. Daddy began snoring within a half hour of my turning out the lights. Within a half hour of that, I heard the mice begin their night's work in the back of our dresser drawers and scurrying along the floorboards.

After Daddy'd snored for a continuous hour, I knew it was safe to get out my flashlight (scavenged from a roadside when he wasn't looking) and start in on the Bible.

I was the first one at the table the next morning, simple enough given that I'd hardly slept. When my turn came to say a verse, I recited all sixty-seven books of the Bible in order. There was an impressed silence. Just as Bobby began “Jes—” I interrupted him and recited them again. Backwards.

Daddy leaned back expansively in his chair once the table was blessed and beamed at me. He lectured my siblings; let “that” be a lesson to them all. The threat in his voice and the pride he took in his handiwork on the back of my legs was clear.

I said nothing. My legs were on fire and I'd woken up with charley horses again; both calves. For the rest of the time we lived with him, I'd wake four mornings out of seven with my calves in a vicious knot.

Through the six hours of church, I kept my head buried in the Bible and ignored Wina when she tried to commiserate with me. Back at home, I lugged the Bible from room to room, trying to find a quiet spot. When we sat down to dinner, I noted that Mama had made Daddy's favorites—deep-fried pork chops, boiled cabbage, butter beans with spicy hot chow-chow, fried green tomatoes from the garden, cornbread and lots of buttermilk to crumble it into. He sat down, rubbing his hands in high good spirits. He blessed the table and I began reciting the mind-numbing lists of names from the second census of the Israelites in the twenty-sixth chapter of Numbers:

These were the Israelites who came out of Egypt:

The descendants of Reuben, the firstborn son of Israel, were: through Hanoch, the Hanochite clan; through Pallu, the Palluite clan; through Hezron, the Hezronite clan; through Carmi, the Carmite clan. These were the clans of Reuben; those numbered were 43,730. . . .

I did this for three and a half minutes.

I went on so long at breakfast the next morning, Mama had to wrap Daddy's breakfast for him to take with him. Since I was still sitting on the edge of my seat, I could feel his feet tapping impatiently as I filibustered my family. I orated for another five minutes at dinner—more lists from Numbers. When I finished, Daddy faked a hearty “Amen,” his fists clenching and unclenching in confused frustration. The table once blessed, I never raised my eyes from my plate, never spoke again. I only had so much energy.

On the third day, the Bible disappeared. I went across the street to the Reverend's. He was only too happy to give me another one.

On the fourth day, I began with Song of Songs, second chapter, sixteenth verse:

My lover is mine and I am his;

he browses among the lilies.

Until the day breaks and the shadows flee,

turn, my lover,

and be like a gazelle or like a young stag

on the rugged hills.

All night long on my bed

I looked for the one my heart loves;

I lo—

Daddy gasped. That shocked me so, I stopped speaking. Daddy was speechless but powerless to bring down God's wrath by interrupting and disapproving of His Word. I had him right where I wanted him. Daddy, who had probably never read an actual page of the Bible, both dreaded and longed to hear what I would say next. I peeked up from my lowered eyes and saw him breathing through his mouth in abject, but approving, surrender. He was impressed. Bobby began to whimper. Suddenly, I was exhausted. Tonight, at last, I knew I'd sleep.

“Jesus wept,” I said.

The next day, after I'd gotten my first night's sleep since the beating, I wore my “new” brown plaid jumper, the one Daddy'd taken his pliers to. Even though it was still too warm for it, it was perfect for hiding the scars on my legs because of its length and the stiff way it belled around me like a hoop skirt. After some practice, I learned to walk so that it never made contact with the backs of my legs. Sitting was torture, given the scratchy corduroy, but sacrifices had to be made. Matched with my longest kneesocks, virtually none of the extension cord marks showed.

As we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, I thought back to breakfast. Daddy might even be proud of the way I'd outflanked him. Confused, angry, sad, and sore, I wanted nothing more than to have things back the way they used to be when I could sit on his lap and watch him laugh. Then I tried to sit down.

My feet were pinned in place. Sometime during the Pledge, the pliered chains had come loose and my dress had fallen off. It was garlanded around my stained white plastic go-go boots with back zippers (only one of which was operational when Daddy'd found them). I stood in the middle of my classroom wearing nothing but a too-small-to-button-below-the-sternum secondhand white blouse, white panties, white kneesocks, and raggedy white boots.

My extension cord scars would be visible to everyone behind me. Since, as the most trusted room monitor with the most gold stars, I sat right up front at the teacher's right hand, everyone could see my crisscrossed legs as I stood there in my hand-me-down underwear, worse than naked. As the tittering washed over me, I could only stand with my face in my hands.

After about a decade, Mrs. Washington, our substitute teacher, came over and draped her white angora sweater around me. Then she took me to the teachers' lounge. I waited there for Mama to come get me.

THE MAN OF THE FAMILY GROWS UP

As we females battled in our own ways against our father, Bobby, four years my junior, began to show scars. At four or five, he would flinch if you reached toward him. At the dinner table, a simple move toward a platter would make him cower, cover his head. He developed bizarre facial tics and a nervous blink that so distorted his face he looked like a tiny stroke victim. He baffled and worried us women, but he infuriated our father. He interpreted all these symptoms as signs of weakness. It never occurred to him that he might be the source.

By six or seven, Bobby was stuttering, cutting holes in the curtains and towels, setting small fires. Even when directly observed, even when he saw you watching him, he'd lie. Soon, he was lying about everything, no matter how minor, terrified that he was in trouble. Speaking directly to him started him shivering and stammering. He was afraid of his own shadow. Daddy just kept trying to toughen him up.

His mortal fear of everything notwithstanding, Bobby exhibited some behavior I now see as desperately defiant. Our father had many ways of cutting us off from the rest of the world; one was to never allow us any money. So, one day when he was about eight, Bobby broke into my father's desk and stole fifty cents. Then he gorged himself on candy. He'd had to gouge the drawer open with a screwdriver; it was completely ruined. When confronted, he stuttered that he'd found the money in the backyard. A “big white man” had broken in and ransacked the desk.

We women never challenged my father in such direct ways. Our skirmishes against him were clandestine. For instance, we'd manipulate him into doing something he wouldn't have done, even though it was necessary, just so he could show us who was in charge. In particular, my response to my father's tyranny was to develop a strongly passive-aggressive streak. I made sure that my defiance wouldn't get me razor-strapped.

In fact, I ensured that my defiance could never be acknowledged for what it actually was. I delighted in finding ways of setting Daddy up to say ignorant things, knowing he'd be too proud to back down. I'd speak as “white” as I possibly could around him, using archaic words mined from the hours I spent lost in the dictionary. I'd answer a sibling in French within his earshot and then grandly translate. It was all I was brave enough for. And in the end, in our very unhealthy Dickersonian way, I “won.” He figured out how to keep me mute: he stopped taking away my books. He even brought them home to me whenever he found some, knowing it would keep me occupied and silent. But Bobby just kept making flagrant, doomed gestures that kept him cringing under my father's belt.

It wasn't just my father Bobby felt impelled to defy. We, his sisters, were always running to help him fight the neighbors and strangers he was always at odds with. If one of us fought, we all had to, but the problem was that he was the only Dickerson who ever had to be saved because he was always provoking fights, often with boys much larger than he.

We were always running pell-mell to find him at the center of a group of gawkers, barely defending himself from at least one teenage boy. He'd be taking their punches while keeping up a running stream of mama jokes and personal insults. The crowd was rolling on the pavement at his patter, which would infuriate the bigger boys he was “fighting,” and intensify their attack. Invariably, our arrival would disperse the combatants: no boy wanted to hit one of us girls and face Eddie Mack. Also, they knew we Dickerson girls fought like marines and, against boys, would use the sticks and stones that no self-respecting boy could. But Bobby was vilified for having to hide behind his sisters. After his opponents smacked him around, we often would, too, for making us fight all the time. And within days, he'd just instigate a new argument with even bigger boys and take his licks until we got there to both help and humiliate him.

My brother was being trained in his father's image. While Daddy insisted we girls be meticulously trained in women's ways, Daddy set about making my brother a man. Long past the age where we were still getting whippings, my father was still teaching my brother his limits. Unlike us, my brother kept testing him.

But Bobby decided on his own definition of manhood and stuck to it. He went out when told to stay in, he spoke when told to be quiet, he broke nearly everything he touched, his teachers couldn't contain his high spirits—his every move seemed designed to infuriate our father. I thought he was mildly retarded.

But for all this, it was in our sharecroppers' blood to pull together as a family. It was impossible not to feel the pull of that blood when an outsider threatened one of us. It was no less impossible to ignore the call of that blood when the threat was inside our own house. Every whipping our father gave him drove a wedge between us women and Daddy. We knew every whipping the son got was one the daughters had only avoided by biting our tongues and knuckling under. Because we were well-trained, God-fearing Southern Baptist women fresh from the cotton fields, we didn't fight back. That wasn't a reasonable option. We saw no dishonor in living to fight another day whole and in one piece. But times had changed. This was the 1970s up North in St. Louis, not Webb, Mississippi, nor Covington, Tennessee. There was no cotton to pick, no back of the bus, no more Mistah Charlie. We owned our own home, I went to school with white kids. Women were burning their bras and demanding to be heard. We were too old-fashioned for that, but revolution was definitely in the air.